Whip out the bong, kids, and start in on that Afghani Kush because Palm has a new commercial. Put it on repeat if you’re on LSD.

One of the common downsides when using any sort of handset case or skin is that you often lose compatibility with accessories. Case in point is the Palm Pre and the Touchstone which requires a special phone back to work with the inductive charger. Good news, Pre owners. Seideo has the answer and it’s called the Innocase Surface.

Oh this is just stupid. A Strategy Analytics study has found that some Palm Pre users are complaining about the lack of an on-screen keyboard. Unbelievable.

Seriously, we’re just as surprised as you are. Not only is Kazaa somehow still in business, they’re also trying anything they can to set themselves apart from all the other digital music retailers you’d rather use instead of them. Now the property of Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Kazaa is setting its sights on bringing HD movie downloads to the masses (well, the masses that use Kazaa), and the Pre is where they’ve decided to make their stand.

We’re all quite excited here to find out that O2 and Movistar will get the Palm Pre in GSM form, opening the phone up to unlocking, hacking, and all sorts of molestation. UK, Ireland and Germany will get the phone on O2 and Spain will get it from Movistar. When, you ask?

Christmas.

That’s right: by the time Palm pinches off the GSM Pre Apple will have probably released iPod Touches with cameras and the HTC Hero, an Android phone that I wouldn’t kick out of bed for eating crackers, will be dancing on the Sprint Pre’s grave. It’s like Palm wants to fail.

My, how time flies in the tech world. It was only one month ago today that the Palm Pre launched to the public, giving users their first chance to try out WebOS first hand. Critical response to the device was generally positive, though much of this stemmed from the phone’s impressive operating system rather than the hardware itself. Still, it was exciting to see a genuinely compelling product come out of Palm for the first time in years, and many of us viewed it as one of the first worthwhile competitors to the iPhone. And then the iPhone 3GS came out, selling 1 million devices in a single weekend.

Since then, the Pre has largely fallen under Apple’s shadow. But there have been murmurs that Palm has still managed to sell far more devices than most analysts were expecting — a recent report from Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder suggests that Palm is still unable to meet demand, and that the company will ship one million phones to Sprint during the device’s first quarter in production. Today we’ve gotten a report that indicates that this may be pretty far from reality.

Waves of exultation and joy must be coming out of Saigon as the first secret G.S.M. Palm Pres begin wending their way out of the secret Pre factories in the jungles to the south. A crack team of commandoes have wrested one of these super secretive models out of the hands of an unsuspecting courier and taken video and photos of it.

Remember that the Palm Pre originally came in G.S.M. flavor back at MWC 2008 and that O2 and Movistar probably have Pre exclusivity which allows us to assume the G.S.M. model will drop sooner than later.

If you were reading a major paper this weekend, you’d notice a striking ad. There’s the Palm Pre resting against an apple core with the words:

The Palm Pre does things the iPhone can’t. Run multiple applications at the same time with real-time updates and even save $1200 over two years. It’s the perfect time to join the Now Network, America’s most trusted 3G network, bringing you the first and only 4G network from a national carrier.

The real call to action was to iPhone users with lapsed contracts – presumably iPhone users who bought the original iPhone two years ago and never upgraded to the 3G – a cohort that I suspect consists of perhaps five Palm engineers and maybe our tech-savvy grandparents. It’s a small number, friends. A small number.

Get some sweet, sweet Palm Mojo early. It’s basically the SDK for WebOS and it just showed up on the interwebs. Most interesting, however, is the lengths folks will go not to anger the Palm Gods:

Currently, no word on whether or not Palm is okay with this, and we can’t imagine that they are thrilled, so download at your own risk. Depending on how this one goes, we may have to pull all the links if Palm requests (we’re all for the sharing of information, but we want to help Palm, not destroy them). If they feel leaking the SDK early is only detrimental to them as a company, then we will remove the URLs.

Sprint’s CFO got crunk all over an investor conference, informing them (between WHAT!s) that Pre sales don’t seem to have been affected by the launch of the iPhone 3G S. WHAT!

Yes, they’re still selling out, but hopefully will be catching up with demand soon.

The Palm Pre Touchstone got raked over coals when it first launched after someone did a little math and discovered the massive mark-up that the $70 accessory carried. Well, Amazon is selling it for only $29 which is a lot better. There is a little trick to get it for this price though.

The Pre is emerging as a polarizing device, even more so than the G1 (which everyone agreed was kind of beta), probably because it’s the closest thing to a legitimate threat that the iPhone has faced. Who wouldn’t get defensive? With strong sales in its first two weeks and an entirely new OS for developers to do their thing with, it’s strong out of the gate but controlled — because the jockey is holding the reins tight. Palm didn’t expect a dynamite launch or a million app sales in a week; what they’ve got so far is, if we can believe what they say, pretty much what they’d hoped for.

Of course, the TechCrunch network is a treasure trove (a rat’s nest, some would say) of opinions, and we have been known to attack the Pre (savagely and repeatedly) despite our interest in it. The app sales numbers for the Pre need more context than a direct comparison to the iPhone App Store, but that is an important data point, so let’s at least do it thoroughly.

In an example of rolling over in the name of “good relationships,” the Pre Dev Wiki has shut down their tethering page because “Sprint could get angry.” This is in stark contrast with iPhone devs who couldn’t give two squirts about “good relationships” and instead produce interesting technical content including unlocked phones.

“We have been politely cautioned by Palm that any discussion of tethering during the Sprint exclusivity period (and perhaps beyond—we don’t know yet) will probably cause Sprint to complain to Palm, and if that happened then Palm would be forced to react against the people running the IRC channel and this wiki.